


Dull Shears

by odoridango



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Backstory, Dysfunctional Family, Family Issues, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-24
Updated: 2014-08-24
Packaged: 2018-02-14 13:24:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2193399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carla Jaeger, as she keeps an eye on the odd developments happening in her house, from Grisha's growing absence, to Eren's odd abilities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dull Shears

**Author's Note:**

> Actually written for this snkkink prompt: http://snkkink.dreamwidth.org/13546.html?thread=8969194
> 
> "As far we have seen, Carla Jeager was an otherwise normal housewife for the district's respected doctor. What she wanted was for Eren to be safe, and not die what she had good reason to think would be a pointless death.
> 
> Only we have good evidence that neither her son and her husband were ordinary. So, let's see Carla's perspective. Is she honestly oblivious, is she in on it, or has she simply started to notice things are not adding up."

Something is wrong in this house. It’s not the first time that Carla has thought this, nor will it be the last. There are signs, everywhere, the furtive letters, the hasty goodbyes at the door, the numerous visits to who knows where, the thrice-damned basement room that Grisha won’t tell her a single thing about.

Another woman, she used to think. She’d watch Grisha come home, Eren tangled in her skirts, watch him look up at her tiredly with his usual small smile, the one that she had always been fond of because it meant that he had been thinking of her. As time passed she began to hate that smile, and her eyes were sharp each time she did the laundry. But there was nothing. No trace of rouge, no rips and stains save for ones that smelled distinctly medicinal, no pungent trace of the particular brand of cheap perfume or smoke that permeated the brothels—and those smells Carla knew particularly well enough to know that Grisha hadn’t been wandering anywhere near them.

Carla is smart, Carla is clever, it’s what drew Grisha to her in the first place. The seamstress that he always bumped into at the apothecary, since the owner was an old friend. No suitors vying for her hand, no relatives to curry favor with; the courting had gone smoothly, with few complications, and they were married within months. But Carla was an orphan who had fought, bit, and traded her way to survival, keeping herself whole and sane, and she was resourceful.

It started with the plague. Waves of people, sick, stiffening until their limbs seemed almost like crystal, slowly unable to process the world around them, only flailing on their deathbeds like animals every so once in a while, whether in pain or something else. Grisha had been the one to fix it, forced to clean out and work in the basement rooms so he wouldn’t keep Carla awake, her nor little Eren, who had only been three or four at the time. Eren was a precious, precocious child, and he was like her in so many ways past the physical. She saw herself in his mulish stubbornness, his enthusiasm and passion, his tenacity, the traits she had cultivated during her days on the streets, getting by on scraps: running smoke and drugs for the brothels, pulling scams and card games in the alleyways, beating the men and women who tried to touch her in the streets. The curiosity, the thoughtfulness, that was Grisha’s.

But curing the plague had turned out to be a mistake. While Grisha claimed that his cure had been a product of luck, he spent more and more hours in the basement, researching, studying, and Carla traced the shadows under his eyes with calloused thumbs and didn’t say a thing, frown carved deep into her mouth.

“What is so important to you, down there?” she asked him softly.

“I need to know,” he told her, kissing her cheek helplessly. His voice was like gravel, scraped raw. He didn’t sound like himself.

It was then that Eren had his period of avoidance. He had always been a bit of a mama’s boy, not that Carla had ever minded watching over and doting on her son, but this was unusual for him, this level of clinginess. He followed her everywhere, even helped out with chores without complaint, but he wouldn’t come close to his father, shied away, tried to stay in contact with his mother at all times.

“Eren, what’s wrong?” she asked him, running a comforting hand through his hair.

His eyes darted about, nervous, and he waved her in closer like he did whenever he had a secret to tell. “I feel like someone’s watching me,” he whispered, voice wavering. “And Dad…Dad’s been really weird.”

“Weird? What do you mean?”

“He, he smells funny,” Eren hissed, tugging at her sleeve, tears welling up in his eyes. “And whenever he looks at me it feels like he’s not looking right. Mom, what’s wrong with him, what’s wrong with Dad? What’s wrong with him?” Watching him cry into her dress broke her heart, and she cradled him close, shushing him, rocking him to the rhythm of the lullaby she used to sing to him when he was just a baby.

“Grisha, Eren’s worried about you,” she said, blearily watching Grisha unpack. Returning from a trip at midnight was rare, but not unheard of.

He stilled. “Eren? Worried about me? Why?”

“Why not?” Carla asked, suspicion sparked. “He’s your son. It’s only natural that he worry.”

“Ah. So it is,” Grisha said carefully, slowly turning back to his unpacking. “I’ll talk to him.”

Eventually, Eren got over his fear, and things went back to normal. Grisha even started to talk to Eren more, in fact, and was spending less and less time in the basement. Carla was grateful to have her husband back, but she never quite forgot what happened.

When Grisha began to spend increasing time in the basement, and replaced the lock, Carla didn’t forget.

When Eren began to show a heretofore absent penchant for violence, and periodic memory loss, Carla didn’t forget.

When Grisha began to spend more of his time outside than he did at home, Carla didn’t forget.

She planted a garden instead.

“I used to have one,” she sighed, when Grisha asked her what her new project was. “We’ve had all this space in the backyard and I thought, why waste it?”

Why waste it indeed. Tearing up “weeds”, squirreling other, smaller herbs and plants under the cover of large, bright, attention grabbing blooms. Carla hadn’t dropped by the apothecary just because the owner was her friend, her home remedies and poultices, among other things, sold well there as family medicines. With Grisha so seldom at home, it wasn’t hard for her to set the money aside, just in case.

“You keep to your roots,” she would tell Mikasa in the future, one day. “They’re your instinct. Your baseline. They tell you who you are. You should never lose that.”

Carla the street rat and Carla the housewife had never been mutually exclusive. Being married, having a child, she had never expected she would even have a family of her own, didn’t expect to live with stability or complete normalcy. After struggling so long to survive, to stay afloat, having Grisha as support was unimaginably reassuring, both emotionally and financially. He was a good man, who treated her well, listened to her, intelligent and affectionate. But this sneaking thing, this man who glanced out the corners of his eyes for eavesdroppers, who had scared their son, and who her instincts blamed for the strange happenings in this household (and she never doubted her instincts), was not the man she had married.

One more chance, she had thought, I’ll give him one more chance.

But that was when she chanced upon Eren and his friends. She opted to watch them for a while, but after a while she noticed, with dawning horror, that Mikasa and Armin seemed to react to Eren’s voice strangely, their bodies jerking a bit like puppets, eyes a little hazy and indistinct in focus. Eren seemed confused, but any command he gave was followed to the tee, though he seemed to frequently forget what was actually happening, giving the same commands multiple times, seeming a little drained and sweaty himself.

No more chances. Carla didn’t forget, and sometimes, Carla didn’t forgive.

It was easy to pick open the lock of the basement door with one of her hairpins, and as she flipped through the notebooks carefully, peered at the shelves of chemicals, she felt, anger slowly rising in her chest, that things really did make so much more sense now. Should she go to the townsguard, or the police?

Watching Eren and Mikasa working earnestly together with her in the kitchen convinced her, that pleasant model of support, of easy normalcy. She would spite her instincts this once, and give one more chance—that is to say, once he returned from his trip into Rose, Grisha would have a single chance to explain himself, and what he was doing to their children, before she kicked him out of the house and burned the basement clean.

She never got to speak to Grisha. He wasn’t there when the house came down around her, trapping her beneath. He wasn’t there when her children tried desperately to save her, or when thety had to be hauled away screaming. He wasn’t there when she stared a titan straight in the face and thought that her instincts, her desire for safety and comfort had led her astray, and wished desperately, horribly, that even if it was easier, Eren and Mikasa would never meet their father again. And he wasn’t there when a titan’s thumb bent her in half, snapping her spine in a brief moment of piercing, indescribable agony, in that merciful moment when she thought of absolutely nothing at all.


End file.
